Where I Started, Where I Am Now

In this post I would like to tell how I've gotten to where I am spiritually: what I used to believe, the important parts of what I believe now, and how I got here.  I was raised as a Southern Baptist, and while our family wasn't as far right as one can be (dancing and rock n' roll were ok), we still fell on the right side of the fence on most religious and controversial issues.  I believed that the Bible was the literal word of God, given through men under divine inspiration.  I did not believe in evolution.  I believed that homosexuality was a sin.  I believed that everyone who did not accept Christ as savior would go to Hell.  Growing up in the South, these were pretty easy things to believe as most of my peers believed the same thing and most of these issues didn't really come up too much outside of church.  Nor were they really discussed when gathering with Christian peers; everyone was kind of on the same page, so we talked about things that we actually struggled with: being kind and loving to everyone, letting Christ shine through us, being in the world but not of the world, and setting a good example. The better parts of Christianity, in my opinion.

As I got older (late high school), I started to become what I think many Christians who are passionate about their faith become in young adulthood: an apologist.  I read a lot, and began to debate certain ideas with myself, for two reasons really.  I wanted to make it so that if I were ever in a position where I needed to defend my faith, I could do so rationally, and with intelligent and well thought out points.  Also, I wanted to be a good evangelist.  If everyone who doesn't accept Christ goes to Hell, then it is my duty as a Christian to try to convince non-Christians to accept Christ.

To me, reason and logic (logos) are and always have been the best tools to change belief, although evidence would suggest that pathos is far more effective (a fact that I hate and to this day willfully and belligerently ignore with all of my heart).  To that effect, I did my best to educate myself on my beliefs and the reasons behind them.  That's what ultimately lead to my beliefs changing.  The problem with being an apologist is that you begin with a foregone conclusion, and then build the facts and the arguments to support that conclusion.  This is bad logic and bad science, and it's not specific to apologists; we all do it all the time.  In psychology, we call it Confirmation Bias.  Any time we specifically seek out and give more weight to evidence that supports a conclusion that we already believe, we are victims of Confirmation Bias.  Even being aware of it doesn't make you immune to it.  It's something that I struggle with especially, being someone who feels very strongly about these issues.  Yet I always try to catch myself and keep an open, unemotional, and detached mentality.

Back then, while I didn't have a name for it, I recognized the problem of confirmation bias, and recognizing that allowing it to guide my reasoning weakened my argument, I tried to suppress it by looking at opposing arguments objectively (which is challenging when your goal is still to support a foregone conclusion).  I suppose the first big issue I struggled with was the issue of homosexuality, and why it was a sin.  The Gay Marriage issue was just starting to be a big thing around that time.  I knew that the Bible said that homosexuality was a sin, but I did not believe that something could be a sin if it was not chosen.  The simplest answer that Christians usually give is that sexuality is a choice, which is pretty much insane and not a response that I dealt with very much.  I could not choose to be sexually attracted to men.  Why would anyone choose those feelings, given the social stigma and persecution that they would undoubtedly face? Wouldn't it just be easier to "choose" to be straight? However, as I said before, pathos is far more powerful than logos, and many people have convinced themselves that sexuality is a choice, despite all common sense, to support their preconceived notions.

The second and far more reasonable response is that while being gay was not a sin, having sex with someone of the same gender was.  Ok... that makes more sense.  While I can't choose my sexuality, I can choose who I have sex with.  I could get behind that.  However, I had difficulty relating this to the issue of gay marriage.  Our legal system is based on a separation of church and state, and the idea (for the most part) that as long as my actions don't interfere with the rights of others, they are legal and up to the individual to decide what's right and what's wrong.  Why would Christians push to keep gay marriage illegal, but not push to illegalize porn, pre-marital sex, drunkenness, idolatry, etc.?

The second major thing that lead to me changing some beliefs was actually reading the Bible.  I realized that I had been supporting this book for years, but had never actually taken the time to read it myself.  If you are an adult Christian who hasn't read the Bible, how can you argue for it? Everything you've been taught about it has been told to you by preachers and parents, presenting tiny little snippets always taken out of the context of the book or letter that contains it? If you believe the Bible is the word of God, why are you putting your faith in the humans who read it to you and not taking it straight from the horse's mouth? Further evidence for the power of pathos is the fact that so many Christians will do just that: argue until they're red in the face, throwing out scripture that they've heard in church and memorized the numbers that go along with it.

I read all of the New Testament and most of the Old Testament, though admittedly some bits of the old testament were a real challenge (and most Christians pick and choose what they like out of the old testament anyway).  What really made me struggle with the Bible wasn't the miracles or the prophecy, or even the inconsistencies between books and letters (though I'll come back to that).  It was the fact that it doesn't read like it came from God, it reads like it came partly from spiritual men who were telling what they felt and believed in the best way they could, and partly from political regimes attempting to justify their actions by placing God into the context of tribal warfare and feudal politics that were common among ancient nations.  Moreover, most of the books never even claim to be the voice of God speaking directly through their authors.  When you actually learn about the Bible, you realize that its canonization and divinity were attributed to it long, long after the individual books and letters were actually written, by humans that were attempting to make sure that everyone was on the same page and teaching the same things in order to form a more unified church.

Back to the inconsistencies in the Bible.  Most of them are minor, some of them are major, but they all bring to mind this one unavoidable fact: that there is room for error within the Bible.  The apologists realize this, and have spent years attempting to explain them away or justify them, often to extreme and ridiculous ends and always with a complete disregard of Occam's Razor. If there is any room for error at all, how can you possibly tease apart truth from human bias and error, especially after all of the translations and interpretations that it's gone through?

The final issue (and one that I still focus on all the time) is the issue of free will.  Free will is essential to the idea of Hell.  If humans are not equally free to accept Christ, then what kind of a just God would send someone to Hell for not doing so?   I started thinking about it in my first year of graduate school with just a little mind game (I don't remember why I started thinking about it, maybe I was just bored).  It's a really simple question that I'm sure plenty of you have toyed with before and has been dealt within sci-fi plenty of times.  If you had a machine that could predict the future, and you asked it, "Will I raise my left hand or my right hand?", knowing that you intended to do the opposite of what it said, what would it say? It's a silly question, but it got me thinking about the issue of free-will and what exactly that means (which I'm sure I'll go into more detail about in a later post).  Since the physical universe seems to follow (for the most part, and at the macroscopic level) the rules of cause and effect,  if we are claiming that Humans have free choice, then we are saying that there is a non-physical aspect of humanity (a mind and/or soul) that interfaces with the brain at some point, but is not subject to the same laws that govern the physical part of us.  This would mean that there would be a non-physical element that is causing physical phenomena within the brain that are significant enough to completely govern decision making.  Despite the fact that there is zero evidence of this so far, why would God, who has gone to such great lengths to make himself hidden and unprovable, hide in such an obvious place? Moreover, if every human had an equal chance to accept Christ, then the likelihood of one becoming a Christian should not be predictable by any external factors.  Christianity should be distributed equitably across the world.  Yet that's not what we see.  It is very, very likely that you will stay within the faith that you were born into.  While there is always a slight probability that you can change, the cards are stacked against you if you were born into Islam or Judaism.  This doesn't apply only to religion.  Psychology is the science of destroying free will.  The more we learn, the more predictable human behavior becomes.  Yes, right now there is a lot of variation.  But psychology and neuroscience are still very young, and the brain is incredibly complicated, subject to a currently immeasurable number of environmental and biological factors.  But it's only a matter of time until we will be able to map your brain and fully predict how you will respond to any situation or stimulus.  Again, this is a very complicated issue and this post is already pretty long, and I know the free will thing is a tough pill to swallow.  I plan to do a longer post dedicated to free will some time in the next ten years or so, but if you're interested I highly recommend reading "Free Will" by Sam Harris.  Super short read, you can finish it in an afternoon.

One thing that I want to point out: none of these changes happened because I went to college, or because I let any influence come into my life.  In fact, it is very rare that I actually debate anyone on any of these points (which is really sad, I wish I had someone who felt strongly but believed differently and was willing to debate these things without getting emotionally invested).  I realize that many of the beliefs that I'm describing here are very specific to certain Christian ideologies, and do not represent all Christians or all viewpoints.  This is just where I come from and where I am.  The only person I'm really arguing against here is myself.

Growth means change.  If you ever stop changing, that means you have stopped growing, and that is a tragedy.  To consider yourself "good enough," or to think that your beliefs and ideas are complete is either extreme arrogance or worse, a willful ignorance and a cowardice that prevents you from facing your imperfections and challenging yourself to continue to grow.  I hope I never get to that point, and I hope I continue to be proven wrong and continue to change and grow.  I try my best to keep an open mind and to read and objectively consider opposing viewpoints on every issue.  No one should ever stop growing, and therefore changing, because no one is perfect.  This does not mean that I believe that if you don't wind up where I am, then you've stopped growing.  That's not at all what I'm trying to say.  All I'm saying is that you should never just accept that your current belief system is the right one with any level of confidence.  If any of these issues were clear or complete, then everyone would agree and there would be no room for debate.  At the very least, educating yourself about the flaws in your belief system and attempting to address all of the counter arguments will make you more able to argue for them, and if you intend to convince anyone of your ideas, this can be a very important thing.